Buffy Summers: Party Slayer: Review Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #1

Fun Fact Of The Day: today, I discovered that my taste in classical music runs toward pieces that involve string instruments, restrained use of the woodwind family, and, are actually Led Zeppelin. Mostly the latter, actually. I determined this during a brief, but abortive attempt at cultivating a taste for classical music while trapped in traffic gridlock on the I-95 corridor. This may not have been the best time to make the attempt, but it’s not like I had anything better to do. I was trapped in a sedan sandwich between what appeared to be a head made mostly of cell phone in front of me and a morbidly obese individual in a Toyota Yaris who seemed to have dozed off in back of me. He would appear to wake every now and again to shovel a fistful of Funyuns down his head and then drop right back to sleep. It was fascinating except for that part where I worried he’d lose control over the brake pedal and smash me into Funyun dusted road pizza. I needed something to distract me.

There are seven television seasons that one could point to in the Buffy-verse as being “Classic Buffy”, as opposed to the comic book Season 8, which I consider to be “New Coke Buffy”. I wanted to like it, but even Whedon has said in interviews that by the end of Season 8 things needed to be reined back in and brought back to basics. But hey, sometimes, you just have to try. For every instance of “No, I think I need something that rocks a little harder than Mr. Vivaldi here”, there is also an “anything goes” reverting back to “basics/world with no magic”. Sometimes the classic is better.

Oooo! I think I may have been there, got this t-shirt and fucked its mom.

Whedon drops us back into Buffy’s world in a situation I think most of us can relate to: dealing with new roommates. What, did you think I was going to say hungover, pantsless and experiencing a partial blackout of the previous evening’s events? I didn’t say “a situation we can allrelate to”. Keep up. But, yes, Buffy has moved out of Xander and Dawn’s apartment and has roommates. They’re in that idyllic time in the life cycle of new roommatehood where they don’t know she’s a super powered being and she hasn’t realized yet that they have probably been using her baby powder to cut the meth they distribute to local school children while she’s at work. They think Buffy is great! And, they let her throw a total rager of a house party so Buffy can drink too much while pretending everything is all right and give Whedon an excuse to reintroduce all of the Scooby gang (and extended Scooby club) to the readers. Also, it introduces the conflict that happened sometime in the drunken, blacked out festivities that leads Buffy to feel this way the next morning:

Shame: A Fragrance By Calvin Klein - douse yourself in its intoxicating musk today!

What could have lead to this? Could it be this:

Did it finally happen? Did Willow bring her a muffin? Wait, I meant aspirin. Definitely aspirin.

Or, was it maybe this:

Why do I hear the theme to "Moonlighting" in the background?

Read the book and find out! The pencils from Georges Jeanty do a really great job of visually conveying the way her friends orbit around her like little planets and how each gravitational pull between Buffy and Scooby has its own tone of energy, comfort and awkwardness. In this issue, Whedon also introduces some potential bad guys, in addition to her never ending battle with Guilt and Shame. I’m really excited he’s stripping everything down and focusing on the characters that really formed the core of the Scoobies over the first five seasons. Except Dawn. I will always hate Dawn. So there. Now go buy this book.